Tag: college

A recent piece posted on Matzav.com signed by "A Crying Bas Yisroel" chillingly lamented the plight of a young single woman, with fine personal qualities but without any family money or yichus, who sits forlornly waiting for her phone to ring with calls from shadchanim. Alas, the phone never rings, and for her, the shidduch system is an ongoing nightmare.

Thousands of young frum men and women in their late teens and early 20s will soon be returning from a year (or two or three) in Israeli yeshivas and seminaries, full of youthful exuberance and idealism. Many who had planned on going to college have changed their minds (often to the dismay of their parents) insisting that secular studies or employment are not for them. They want to be full time learners or the wife of one.

Question: My husband and I both travel a great deal, independent of each other. My husband owns a start up company and I am very supportive of his need to travel constantly during the next couple of years. In the meantime, I am the primary wage earner and occasionally have to travel myself. Our youngest child is in college so we aren’t tethered to home. A long time ago, about 15 years, my husband was unfaithful. Obviously we worked through it and determinedly rebuilt our marriage. While he has not given me any reason to doubt him, lately it seems as if we hardly talk. We spend so much time apart and when we are together, we are both so exhausted. I have not brought up this issue with him as I am not sure what to say. Can you help?

If you scratch a Holocaust denier long enough, you may reveal an anti-Semite, but not always. You will, however, probably find someone like the morally repellant Kaukab Siddique, a Pakistani-born tenured associate professor of English and journalism at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, who seemingly puts great faith in conspiratorial dramas in which a crafty and all-powerful enemy (i.e., Jews) weaves oft-repeated claims about the Holocaust just to elicit the world's sympathy and promote Zionism and the creation of Israel.

Misinformation and hate are spreading thick at American colleges. We'd like to think that it's not the type of thing that's happening on our very own campuses, but it's certainly occurring.

Of blogs there is no shortage (roughly 130 million, in fact, according to the latest statistics). Good blogs that address contemporary issues relevant to the Orthodox Jewish world, however, are harder to come by. Emes Ve-Emunah - haemtza.blogspot.com - is one such blog.

In August, the Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism (YIISA) brought together some 110 scholars to present papers and share ideas relevant to the theme of "Global Antisemitism: A Crisis of Modernity." The conference had as its seemingly straightforward, and productive, objective to further the initiative's primary role of identifying and seeking to explain current manifestations of the world's oldest hatred.

She walked into my husband's office, accompanied by her father. They were clearly from Israel's lower socioeconomic class. The father was a large, frightening man who reeked of alcohol, and his daughter was a recent ba'alat teshuvah.

The Stories 1. Josh is a 20-year-old college student who was given a yeshiva education from kindergarten through 12th grade. No doubt his parents spent well over $100,000 for his solid Jewish education. He is involved in Jewish life on campus and attends minyan regularly, though life on campus is a spiritual battle. So when he told me he went to his college football team's stadium to attend a game on a Shabbos afternoon, I was a little disappointed.

The Weinbaum Yeshiva High School, a Modern-Orthodox high school in Boca Raton, Florida, is one of the leading academic high schools in the region.

For many parents late summer is a bittersweet time. Children are going off to college, or a post- high school year in Israel, or getting married.

Question: Have you encountered any hostility from family or friends for attending college?

In last week's column I published a letter from a young man who felt that he was treated unfairly in his quest for a shidduch.

Question: Where do you think you'll study after high school?

Every August thousands of children ages 17-19 leave the only home they have known, the community they grew up in, the neighborhood they are familiar with - even the country of their birth, and fly thousands of miles to a new and relatively strange environment where they will remain for a year.

Question: Anti-Israel activism has become all too common on college campuses across the country. Have you experienced any of that?

In Praise Of Marc Shapiro (I)    I thoroughly enjoyed Elliot Resnick's interview with Professor Marc Shapiro ("Things Once Taken For Granted Are Now Considered...

In my previous column I wrote about an ehrlich young man (who does not live in New York) who was a college educated earner with an excellent income (his wife won't have to work if she so chooses) who learned in his spare time but was having a hard time getting an in-town shidduch because most of the girls wanted full-time learners.

This memoir, from the founder of the National Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts, relates Lansky's experiences learning to speak and read Yiddish in college, only to discover that "his" new language was in danger of passing out of existence.

A number of weeks ago I received an email from someone asking me to consider writing an article about yeshiva high school students and college education.

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As Israelis suffer the stress of disengagement and the beginning of the dismemberment of the Jewish homeland, it is still important for American religious Jewish families to come on Aliyah.

While recently riding on a private local bus, I couldn't help but overhear two elderly, balbatish ladies talking.

Young adults in the thousands have recently returned from a year (or two or three) in Israeli yeshivas and seminaries, full of youthful exuberance and idealism.